We’ve fallen a bit behind in our coverage of retractions in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), so we wanted to call attention to two very helpful ones from recent months.
Here’s one notice, which appeared online on August 5: Continue reading Two detailed retraction notices appear in PNAS
The other day we reported that Naoki Mori had lost his 23rd paper to retraction for image manipulation and duplication. Turns out we were wrong by a pretty wide margin.
The International Journal of Cancer has retracted seven more articles by the disgraced Japanese researcher, all for the same reasons:
The following article has been retracted through agreement between the first author and several coauthors, the journal Editor in-Chief, Peter Lichter, and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. … After an investigation the retraction has been agreed due to inappropriate duplication of images and overlap with other published work.
The papers are as follows: Continue reading That’s a Mori! Seven more retractions brings latest count to 30
Believe it or not, we look for policies to praise here at Retraction Watch HQ, especially if they mark a change from approaches that we and others have criticized. So we were heartened to read this retraction notice in The Journal of Neuroscience for “Lmx1b-Controlled Isthmic Organizer Is Essential for Development of Midbrain Dopaminergic Neurons:”
The Journal of Neuroscience has received a report describing an investigation by the Shanghai Institute of Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, which found major data misrepresentation in the article by Guo et al. Because the results cannot be considered reliable, The Journal is retracting the paper.
The study has been cited five times since it was published in 2008, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. Here’s some background on why we thought we’d have something to praise, from a Nature feature this week on retractions: Continue reading Does a new retraction suggest a glimmer of hope for transparency at the Journal of Neuroscience?
Like many researchers, Frank Walboomers frequently checks the scientific databases to see when his latest publications appear. He was doing so a few months ago when he came across his name on an article — “Effects of pro-inflammatory cytokines on mineralization potential of rat dental pulp stem cells” — published online in July in the Journal of Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, that he hadn’t written.
The first author of the paper, Xuechao Yang, was a former doctoral student in Walboomers’ laboratory at Radboud University Nijmegen. It didn’t take Walboomers long to figure out what had happened: Continue reading “Ill communication” leads to retraction of tissue paper (sorry) for authorship issues
This past April, Amparo Acker-Palmer and colleagues published a study in Nature, “Ephrin Bs are essential components of the Reelin pathway to regulate neuronal migration.” Within a day of its publication, Nature readers were raising questions about many of its figures. They started like this:
Andy Gu said:
Looks like Fig 1a, the two middle figures are actually the same with little move from desired regions. I don’t trust their data now…..
After several such comments, Nature senior editor Noah Gray weighed in: Continue reading You can do that? A massive correction in Nature, but no retraction
Margaret Munro, a Postmedia News reporter whose work we’ve had the chance to admire before, has a few great stories running in Canadian papers today about what happened in some recent scientific fraud investigations.
She bases the stories on Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) documents obtained under a freedom of information request. NSERC — which provides $1 billion per year for research — seems to have gone far out of its way to keep the names of the researchers a secret.
In one set of heavily redacted documents, however, they did mention a December 2008 retraction. As Retraction Watch readers know, we investigate retractions…well, not exactly for a living, but we sure spend a lot of time doing it. So we threw ourselves at our favorite database and made some connections.
Long story short: We’re quite sure we’ve found the unnamed researcher. Continue reading Unveiled: Anonymous researcher found guilty of fraud in Canadian funding agency documents
We’ve been reporting on the case of Zhiguo Wang, the Montreal Heart Institute researcher who was dismissed earlier this month for scientific misconduct. In the announcement about Wang’s dismissal, the institute said it had requested the retraction of three papers other than the two that Wang had himself retracted earlier this summer, making a total of five.
We’ve been following up with journals that published Wang’s work, with the help of eagle-eyed Retraction Watch readers, and last week reported on the first of those three additional retractions, in the Journal of Cell Science. Late last week, we heard from Juan Carlos Lopez, the chief editor of Nature Medicine, which had published a paper by the group. Lopez had earlier said he was waiting for a Montreal Heart Institute report on their findings. He tells us it’s unlikely the Nature Medicine paper will be among those retracted: Continue reading Nature Medicine paper by former Montreal Heart Institute researcher Zhiguo Wang unlikely to be retracted
We’re following the case of a group that recently retracted a Nature Immunology paper for figure irregularities, soon after being forced to correct images in a Science paper for similar reasons.
The Nature Immunology paper, “The helminth product ES-62 protects against septic shock via Toll-like receptor 4–dependent autophagosomal degradation of the adaptor MyD88,” has been cited just twice since it appeared online in February 2011, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. The retraction notice, which appeared online on July 19: Continue reading Group retracts Nature Immunology paper for figure irregularities after posting a correction to Science
The authors of a 2010 Journal of Immunology paper have retracted it, saying that part of one of the figures was actually a placeholder from another experiment.
According to the retraction notice for “Stimulation of FcgRI on Primary Sensory Neurons Increases Insulin-Like Growth Factor-I Production, Thereby Reducing Reperfusion-Induced Renal Injury in Mice” by Naoaki Harada, Juan Zhao, Hiroki Kurihara, Naomi Nakagata, and Kenji Okajima: Continue reading Group under investigation retracts second paper, claims errant figure was just a placeholder
Last week, we reported on an uniformative retraction notice in Molecular Biology and Evolution (MBE), an Oxford University Press (OUP) title, that the publisher wanted $32 to read. To OUP’s credit, they quickly acknowledged that the retraction hadn’t been handled properly.
Earlier this week, OUP’s senior publisher for journals Cathy Kennedy followed up with some welcome news: Continue reading Oxford University Press clarifies policy: All retraction notices will be open access